Friday, December 26, 2014

Ed is keeping the family well represented in the writing publications department. Here is a brief intro and poem about him that appeared in the Christmas Day edition of Keeping Our Eye on Sun Valley . The pictures aren't included, soI'll put the actual link at the bottom.

It came Upon a Midnight Clear

Ed Northen, a retired fire captain and paramedic who worked in the field in
southern California for 34 years, could be considered the poet laureate of
the Wood River Valley…along with former Blaine County Commissioner Len
Harlig, of course!

Northen, who has been writing
poetry for 20 years, has been published in Word Gathering, Ariel, Chimera
and Poetry Works and reads at local poetry gatherings.

He kindly allowed us to use one of his poems to brighten your Christmas
Day!

When he’s not writing poetry, you can find Ed at Galena Lodge where he
volunteers on the BCRD Nordic Patrol. Or you can find him out practicing
environmental stewardship, hiking, trail running and fly-fishing as a guide
for Silver Creek outfitters.

It Came upon a Midnight Clear

From the Mountain top
I peer through layers
Of wintry firmament

Air so translucent
It has dimension
I see beyond the stars

Whose gaseous state
Burn brightly
Like fiery diamonds

Heaven is not far
Not in distances
Of light years

But in the invisible
The unseen
Which envelops me.

My vision is clearer
Among the celestial luminaries
When society’s chaos is removed

And I am left
With the sparseness of
Essential thoughts

I consider the forest
Resembling matchsticks far below
Living trees

Which need not be cut down
Except one
To make a cross

On which God
Must hang
To become the propitiation

And I, an heir
A bloody beneficiary
Of Love

On this sparse summit
Suspended in air
I abandon self

Until my voice erupts
With spontaneous chorus
This Eve of the Christ’s birth

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

One of the great events of the year was the Northen family
reunion at St. Simon’s Island. We all had a lot of fun, but now that we are
headed into winter, how much do your remember?
This is the easiest quiz ever because you were all there, but let’s see
if you remember who did what? Some questions can have more than one person for
the answer.

1. Who spotted a shark on the beach?

2. Who climbed up on the fireplace mantel to find a toy
lizard?

3. Who slept in a closet?

4. Who had an alligator on their head?

5. Who had their arm in a sling?

6. Who ran around naked by the swimming pool?

7. Who lead an ice cream making activity?

8. Who saw a wild horse?

9. Who slept overnight in an airport?

10. Who won the most games of ping pong?

11. Who had the biggest bedroom?

12 Who was the best
paddle board rider?

13. Who used an app to name all of the constellations in the
night sky on the beach.

14. Who had a visitor during our stay at St. Simons?

15. Who was the last to leave when the vacation was over?

We took turns with various meals. Name the family or person that was in charge
of each meal.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Growing up in a large family fifty years ago, Thanksgiving was always a huge event in which relatives who may not see each other at any other time of year gathered. Even today those memories still filter through. Ed has written a poem remembering those family Thanksgiving. It is interesting to me to think about in what ways our perceptions were the same and how they were different.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

I’ve just finished listening to a
series of tapes called Writing and
Civilization, which traces the origins of writing and the development of
various writing systems throughout the world including how scholars of
languages have worked to decode writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics,
Mayan glyphs and Linear B.In the final
episode, the lecturer, Marc Zender, made
the claim that by the year 2050 printed books will for all practical purposes
be dead. Our children’s will no more look at books made of paper as something
to read than we would at quills and ink as something to write with.This seemed an amazing claim coming from a
Harvard professor who is not only a self-professed bibliophile but whose entire
career has been devoted to the study of writing.At the same time, it seems extremely logical.

Taking the long view, this does not seem a surprising
development. Such radical change in
reading media has taken place before. The
development of the codex (i.e. the book with pages) from the scroll and
development of moveable type that made writing books long hand unnecessary are
two obvious examples. Moreover, as Zender
points out, in the same way that from our current point of view the use of the
printing press had advantages that made continued writing of books by long hand
seemed doomed to obsolescence, the modern ebook (or any “book” on electronic
media) has the advantage of being
cheaper, more portable and easier to replace than hard copy books, making the
continued production of traditional books
other than as an art form unlikely to continue very far into the future.

Writing this, I am sitting in my own library surrounded by
shelves and shelves of books. As someone who loves the physical feel of a book,
who likes sitting with a cup of coffee

and relaxing sprawled in a comfortable chair with a book on
my lap, or simply pulling a book off of
a shelf and diving at random into the mind of some person at a distant place
and time, the prospect that a generation after my death all of this will be
mulch, or at best, vying for a spot on Antique’s Roadshow, is a bit
daunting. At the same time, as Zender
points out, the scribe who worked by hand on manuscripts not doubt looked in
the same way at the advent of the printed book with the same sense mixture of concern
and wistfulness – as though some integral part of the civilization he knew and
that seemed natural to him were being lost.

Nothing is going to stop the continued advent of the
technological revolution. It isn’t even
an advent anymore, but an established fact.
Those of us old fogies who are refugees from the world of books and
think that because we happen to be on Facebook that somehow we have made the
transition should take another look at our lifeboat. It’s already sinking. Our
children’s children’s world will be a new one, speaking a language that we are
probably constitutionally incapable of learning. There is neither praise nor
blame in this. It is simply the way that
history is moving. I never rode to school
on a horse as my father did, but we both got to where we had to go.

Being the visually oriented person I am, though, I do feel
luck to have been born into history at time when print was at its apogee. When you stop to think that before Gutenberg
only the very rich could afford books and that it is only that for the past one
hundred years of our country that most people are even literate and books
readily available, it has been a great time to be alive. Except for this very recent time, culture has
been predominantly oral. The bulk of the
population did not learn by reading or communicate through print – they talked
and listened. I think that I would have been a very bad fit for that kind of
culture being both poor at expressing myself orally and not much better at
remembering what I hear. With the unrepentant ramping up of electronic media,
the chances are that we are returning to an oral culture once again. Writing has become tweeting and it won’t be
too long before the keyboard is obsolete.
We’ll simply talk to the computer and it will answer us. We will be able eliminate the intervening
printed media. It is more than just a bit ironic that those who used to laugh
at the idea of the stereotypic paternalistic boss who dictated to his secretary
rather than simply write for himself will once again, in effect return to
dictating, albeit with an electronic secretary.

As Zender points out, books made of
paper won’t disappear overnight. Those of us born into the print culture will
continue to read and buy them (that is until book stores turn totally into
Kindle and Nook stations) and we will still sit down and read those same
storybooks our parents read to us to our grandchildren, passing on a tradition
even as it ceases to be.I’m not writing
a requiem.Quite the opposite.It is fascinating being poised on this point
in history, both able to look back on the history that has made us who we are,
and looking forward to what the future might be for those that come after us.
In the short run, however, I think I will just get up and grab a book from the
shelf.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

As anyone reading this blog probably knows, I just returned
from Paris. I with Lora, Maya, Lora’s
brother Mike, his wife Bev and my niece Lauren. It is hard to limit the number of
superlatives one can toss out about Paris, but, as wonderful as that city was,
the aspect of that trip that stands out the most in my mind today, was the side
trip that we all took to Normandy.

Bev's father had been a decorated American fighter pilot in
World War II. She had the diary that recorded in Hemingway-like sparseness, her
father’s experiences during the invasion of the Allied Forces into Normandy in
June of 1944 and wanted to visit the site where it had happened. As someone who refused to be drafted during
the Vietnam conflict, I've never been an aficionado of military history, but
the day we spent on the Normandy beaches made us all take some baby steps
towards the reality of the war for all those involved there. We set out from Bayeux where we were
staying, passing through the countryside where the German troops occupied the
small towns and French resistance fighters snuck out of their homes at night to
do whatever they could to thwart them.
We passed a church in one of the villages that is still being rebuilt
and others, our guide explained,
completely disappeared.

Our tour was limited to some of those beaches that American
soldiers breached - Utah, Pont Du Hoc
and Omaha. Walking across the landscape
where concrete bunkers and remnants of fortifications still sit and where the
surface of the land is still sculpted by the bombs that hit it gave a
materiality to the events that took place there that all of us felt. But for me, the moment that came closest to
revealing some clue of how it must have felt to be there on D-Day was when we
stood on Omaha beach at the edge of the water looking up at the cliffs where
the German guns were sitting on that day and knowing that the only way there
was to move was forward.

In the twenty-first century, everyone knows that history is not
a fact, but simply a narrative constructed by the winners to tell their
story. Even with the shards that we have
to build it from – the diaries, the abandoned bunkers, scared landscapes – it
is always going to be a protean tale.
Still, I think that having had the chance to visit the site where events
occurred that have long since been subsumed into American mythology gave me the
chance to toggle my own views. I still
won’t be rushing to join the Sons of the American Revolution, but at least, it
has given me a bit more of an ability to participate in the collective memory
that today, Veterans Day, represents. And,
if I’m not mistaken, that is what
national holidays are all about.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Everyone knows that the stories we tell about our lives are
constructions. They are a way of stringing
together what we take to be facts into a tale that helps us to explain
ourselves or perhaps to project the image that we want others to have of
us. Facts in themselves mean
nothing. They are like a floor full of
scattered beads; until we link them all together in some configuration, they
make no sense. This is a problem not
just for writers of memoir and autobiography but for historians, philosophers and
archaeologists as well, and as such not one that is going to be solved in a
blog post. What I wanted to do was to
simulate how it is to arrange these events to tell a story.

If you were to take ten events from your life, write them on
slips of paper and throw them in a baseball cap, would your best friend,
daughter or significant other be able put them order. I thought I’d try. To make this a bit easier, I will take events
not strictly from my life but from that of the Northen family of my generation.
Just number them from 1 to 10 in the order that you think happened. (Hint - #1
is a gimme.)

___Steve was killed in a car accident.

___A fire burned down the garage and back bedroom of the
house where we were living.

___Our family lived in Hawaii.

___Dave got married (first time).

___Mom was hospitalized with a blood clot for six months and
nearly died.

___Brother Pat was born.

___Maya was baptized at San Juan Capistrano mission.

___Judy moved to Tennessee.

___I was hit by a car driven by an uninsured 16 year old
girl.

___Dad joined the Navy.

Even when you have a sequence, though, it is still not a
story. What are the connections? What
are the causes/effects? What is missing
and how are the gaps filled in? As a
writer, and to a lesser extent, an amateur genealogist, these are the really
interesting questions. Given this bare
set of facts or the bare facts of your life and fueled by their own
imagination, what story would your son or daughter write?

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Hanging on the wall among the pantheon of family pictures in
upstairs guestroom is a copy of an old
black and white photograph that has been hanging there for years. In it, a
family is sprawled across a yard in front of a mid-west style farmhouse. The
clothes they are dressed in – the men including boys in long sleeve white
shirts, vests, coats and hats, the women in floor length dresses with long doily-like
collars around the neck – suggests that this picture is from the end of the 1800’s
or beginning of the 1900’s. A man,
looking like the family patriarch, is sitting in a chair with his arms crossed, and a woman, presumably his wife, stands near
him with hands on a baby carriage. In
front of them, the children all lounge in the grass and to the side a robust
woman stand beside a man who may be her husband but comes barely to her
shoulder.

I’ve always vaguely known
that it was somehow related to my mother’s side of the family but I was never sure
just how. Yesterday, through a stroke of luck I discovered who the family was.
I was viewing a copy of a page from the
June 30, 1969 Centennial edition of the Le
Mars Sentinel, the newspaper of Le Mars, Iowa. The page was titled, “Some Early Houses of Plymouth
County.” In the middle of bottom row of pictures was one with the
captain “The barn and farm of Valentine Sitzmann.” I recognize the name immediately, of course.
The pictures on either side were labeled “Walnut Rose Stock Farm, Residence of
Valentine Sitzmann” and “The Residence of Joseph Sitzmann,” respectively. Valentine and Joseph Sitzmann were the
brothers of my great-grandmother Katie Sitzmann.

The pictures themselves looked to have been photocopied so
much that no detail was visible. As in a photograph taken by high contrast
film, all that remained were the vague outlines of shapes with white spaces
between them. In staring at the darkest
of them, that of Joseph Sitzmann’s residence, however, I began to recognize the
outlines of the shapes and realized that it was exactly the same picture as the
one hanging on the wall in the upstairs bedroom. This told me not only whose family it was but,
by default, also where the picture was taken.
It was on the land the Joseph Sitzmann owned in Lincoln Township, Plymouth
County, Iowa. (The one I described in the Northen History blog post “Unscrambling
the Map: Notes on the Sitzmann Family” a few weeks back.)

The man in the chair is obviously Joseph Sitzmann, but who
were the others? I located Joseph
Sitzmann in the 1910 federal census when he was 41 and his wife Eva was 40. The census lists the children as George (20
years old), T. Mary (18), Edward (15) and James W. (13) and then stops,
although quite obviously Joseph did not.
That is as far as I’ve gotten. I need to investigate further, so for now
I’ll leave it to anyone reading this to try to match names with faces in the
picture.

Staring at the old picture on a wall did make me wonder about
the people in it, who they were and what their lives were like. I wonder what it would be like for someone a
hundred years from now uncovering a family photograph and trying to figure out
who the people were, how they were related and what was going on. Take the
following family picture for example:

What would one of our descendants who stumbled across this
in year 2114 make of it? One can only
guess.

Sunday, July 06, 2014

I’m not what most people would call a fashionista, but when
I go to the closet to grab a belt, I am always amazed at how many I have. They all hang on a circular fake brass ring
that is suspended from the closet pole by a similar piece of brass shaped like
the top of a hanger. By nature, I am
loathe to throw out something that still has use, but in the case of these belt
there is something added. When I pull
off a belt off of a ring, I’m also pulling off a piece of personal history.
And, admittedly, some of them look like it. Which would I toss?

The oldest belt is a wide, caramel-colored leather belt with
designs etched into it. It was bought many years back when I first began
teaching elementary school at La Purisima school in El Modena, California. The students I taught in that sixth grade
class are now in their mid-50’s. It
reminds me of the high ideals and hopes I had, the belief that teachers really
could make a difference for children, my excitement about being part of
that. I have to almost laugh when I
think that one of the more influential parents in the school tried to get me
fired for being a Communist. No, despite
the fact that it is tearing around where the buckle snaps on, I can’t give that
up.

There is another old belt that I rarely wear, but also
cannot give up. It too is a thick
western style belt, with an iron buckle so heavy it almost pulls me
forward. On the buckle is an engraving
of some sort and the words Panama Red.
The irony is that it belonged to Lora’s father, a Buffalo accountant and very unlikely cowboy,
who probably had no idea what the words on the buckle meant. He died of ALS less than a year after Maya
was born, so, of course, even though I may wear it only once or twice year, it
is not going anywhere.

The belt that I wear the most is probably a mere fifteen
years old. It is a medium width brown
belt, with a light brown strip running down the middle. It can go with anything but is probably among
the most beat up of the belts on the hanger.
It is a belt that I purchased with a gift certificate given to me by my
supervisor, John McClafferty, shortly after beginning my job at Inglis
House. John had given me a gift
certificate to Banana Republic, a store normally out of my price range, but it
just covered the cost of a belt. I’ve
had no actual friends as an adult - my life and personality just have not
allowed for that - but in the last twenty years, John is the person who has
actually come the closest. When you are
a person like me, you don’t throw out the those reminders that friendship may
be possible.

One belt that probably would surprise people to see in my
closet is a meshed metal belt, the color of aluminum. It is studded with faux-turquoise and designs
that are no doubt supposed to invoke Navajo work. The tip is a single piece of metal shaped in
the approximate shape of a pit viper.
The belt belonged to Eli when he was in high school and speaks of a time
when he was into experimenting with the next edgy fashion. No doubt when I wear it in the year 2014, anyone
who bothered to look in the first place would probably also be looking for a
rainbow on my shirt. I don’t care. Both
my youth and my children’s has gone fast enough.

There is one belt on my hanger that is functional in the
extreme. It is that shiny imitation
leather a Walmart shopper would take as upscale. One side is brown and one black and the
handle twists so that it allows me to use either side – the kind of belt that
makes it the only one you need to bring on a trip. It is not for functionality, that I keep the
belt but for the occasion on which it was bought. I was heading from Philadelphia to Orange for
Mom’s funeral when after sitting in a plane out on the runway my flight was
cancelled. I caught a flight, but my clothes were delayed. Ed and Eli (whose
plane made it before me) raced around town to try to come up with an outfit for
me so that when I landed I would not have to show up at my mother’s viewing in
old clothes. Whenever I put it on, I’m grateful
for their effort and the memory the belt leaves me with.

A sixth belt, a middle of the road strip of rawhide with a
basic buckle that pretty much blends into any work-a-day clothing without being
seen is probably the one that represents me best, but all of these and the half
dozen other belts hanging from the ring each find their use. The belts represent a bit of a conundrum – a
personality crossroads, if you wish. On
the one hand, my mantra is that belts are like pairs of shoes: you really only
need two. One to wear and one just in case something happens to those. On the other hand, I’m congenitally
pre-disposed never to waste or throw anything out whether it be food, old
clothes, letters from family or belts. I
suspect all of these belts will be hanging there in the closet for quite some
time. Or until I awaken one morning and find that by the graces of some
well-meaning elves, they have disappeared.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Father’s Day is coming up and it
is a bit sobering to realize that my dad has been dead for fourteen years
already. Though there is a lot that I
could say about him, the main thing that I have to thank him for is that in an
age when males dominated their families, and women were often treated as second
class citizens, Dad shared the housework and treated Mom as an equal
partner. That is a legacy that I hope he
has passed on to his sons and grandsons.

Rather than saying more about
someone that my children actually never really got much chance to know, I thought
it might be fun to re-employ the quiz format to see how much every knew and let
them find out more about him. Siblings
should be able to get an 8 on this, but for others, a 7 would be a great score. These are all true or false.

Dad came from a family of
mostly redheads.

Aside from mutton, the
only two foods Dad said that he did not like were hominy and fried green
tomatoes.

Dad was raised Baptist,
when he and Mom wanted to get married he first had to convert to Catholicism.

Once when Mom could not
get the laundry done, Dad had to wear her underwear for the day.

Dad did not want any of
his sons named after him.

When we were young, Dad
took the boys every two weeks to the barber shop to get haircuts.

Dad was pretty style
conscious, so that probably helps to explain why all of his sons are the
same way.

When he went he graduated
from high school and went to join the Navy, Dad had to change the way he
had always spelled his last name.

Though most of Dad’s
family had blue eyes, Dad always listed his eye color as green.

Dad did not believe in
corporal punishment.

Answers:

1.True.
Dad’s father, one sister and the majority of his brothers had red hair.

2.True.
Dad would eat almost anything. After having mutton for three months straight
when stationed near Australia in the Navy, he said the site of it almost made
him nauseous.

3.False.
Dad had to promise to raise the kids Catholic, but he did not actually convert
himself until much later in life.

4.True.
I don’t think he advertised it, though.

5.True. But Steve had his first name as a middle name
(Stephen James) and Ed has his middle name as a first name (Edward Charles).

6.False.
Dad bought a barber kit and cut all of our hair himself.

7.False.
Have you seen the family pictures?

8.True.
His immediate family had always spelled the last name Northern and so had he up
starthrough high school, but his birth
certificate read Northen, so the Navy made him use that. His grandfather,
William, by the way, had spelled it Northen.

9.False.
While Dad’s eyes had a lot of green in them, he always listed his eye color as
hazel.

10.False.
Dad was not big on physical punishment. Mom was always the one who said “wait
until your Dad gets home” but he would spank us once in a while when we
misbehaved and on rare occasion got out the belt.

Monday, May 26, 2014

I’ll admit it – I’m not a Dr. Phil fan. I don’t read self-help books and I consciously
avoid self-described “inspirational” literature. Perhaps it is just ego on my part, but I have
yet to meet the person who has their life so together that they are in the
position to set themselves up as a model of how I should live mine. I already know my daughter Maya is a talented
writer (and if anyone needs proof, all they need to is check out her review of
Liz Schumer’s novel Buffalo Steel in
the current issue of Wordgathering),
but when the book to which she contributed a chapter, Playing and Staying at the Top of Your Game, was published and available on Kindle last week bearing
the subtitle “Inspirational Short Stories by Women for Women,” I had to temper
a proud parent’s enthusiasm with a certain amount of caution.

I need not have worried. Maya’s article “Talking Yourself Into Success”
is a terrific piece of writing.

I was only a few sentences into the article when I
completely forgot it was my daughter who had written the piece and began
hearing the self-assured voice of a professional. It was lucid prose uncomplicated
by jargon that - as an erstwhile instructor myself - I could easily see taking
its place in an introductory college business course. As Maya, points out, it challenges potential
business owners to ask themselves questions that a standard course on business organization is not even
going to see in the landscape, but which are critical, especially for someone
with a dream of owning their own business.
Moreover, the applicability of the article is not limited to business
owners or even business professionals. I
think anyone who has a career or job that they feel themselves invested in will
come away from reading the article asking themselves a few questions. If they
can’t, perhaps its time to turn on Dr. Phil.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Mom’s birthday is coming up in a few days and whenever it
comes around, I always feel the impulse to reflect upon her life a bit. Usually that is through a poem or written
reflection – and I may still do that – but I decided to do things a bit
differently. So many stories swirl
around Mom’s memory that I thought it
might be fun to devise a little quiz to see who can separate fact from fiction. All of the questions are true or false. A score of 8 or better
means that you knew Mom (aka Grandma Northen) pretty well. A
score of less than three means you are probably reading the wrong family’s
blog.

1. Mom got her tongue stuck to a gate post once.

2. Karen was
Mom’s favorite sibling.

3. Mom lived outside of the United States for a
year or two.

4.Mom’s
motto was, “If you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say it at
all.”

5. All things considered, Mom had a pretty darned
easy life.

6. The first time Mom kissed a boy, she went home and told her mother she was pregnant.

7.For many years Mom had a huge running ulcer on her ankle.

8. When my family lived with my grandparents in Santa Ana, Mom tied my brother Steve to the clothes line.

9. Even though she was born in North Dakota, Mom became a pretty good swimmer when she moved to California.

10. When she was growing up, Mom wanted be a home economics teacher.

Here are the answers. Feel free to add some of your own questions
in the comments .

1. True. When Mom was little and lived in South
Dakota, she decided on one cold winter day to lick the gate post to see what it
tasted like.Her tongue stuck to the post because of the cold and she had to have help to get it off.

2. False. Sister Karen was the sibling that was over at the house the most, but they had a running feud Whenever
Sr. Karen left, Mom would always be up in arms.

3.True.At
least technically. when we lived in Hawaii in 1948-49, Hawaii was not yet one
of the states. It was not admitted to the union until 1959.

4. False.
That was Dad’s motto. Mom had no
problem expressing her opinion about other people.

5. False. Are you kidding?

6. True. Grandma and Grandpa Wilkins weren’t exactly in the forefront of teaching their kids about sex education.

7. True. Through most of my high school years and
beyond Mom had a huge purple ulcer on her ankle that perpetually oozed liquid. She had to keep it wrapped and
put ointments on it all the time.

8. False. It was Dave that she tied to the clothes
line.

9. False.
When they were first married, Mom nearly drowned in the ocean. Dad had
to save her. After that she was very
leery of swimming at the beach and never really learned to swim.

10.True. Unfortunately, her father made her quit
high school and go to work.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

One of the things that becomes clear in trying to do family history research is how patriarchal our society. Records are kept for male family members, but other than censuses it is a lot harder to find information on the women. This was particularly evident with researching the Northen family on my father’s side, when the families continued to live in the same county. Elizabeth was such a popular name, for example, and remarriage because of early deaths so common, that finding a woman’s surname at birth can prove nearly impossible. Because of that, it is interesting in researching the Roeick branch of the family, that it is one of the women that seems to tie all of the pieces together. That was my third great grandmother, Alice Beale. Here is the story.
My second great grand father on my father’s mother’s side was John Ball Lewis. After his first wife, Nancy Wroe died, he remarried a woman named Alice Roeick. Trying to find the true spelling of Alice’s name is a challenge. Roeick is the name on her grave. On her son’s marriage license it is listed as Rhurisk, but elsewhere and in her daughter’s middle name it is spelled Ruic. Alice’s father’s name is William and his last name is variously spelled Ruick, Reuick, Rueick and her grandfather Daniel’s name is Ruirek and Ruark. You see the problem. Trying to put these pieces together is pretty iffy but to make things easier I’ll use Ruick as the last name since that is the one that seems to pop up most often.
Daniel Ruick was born in 1748 and apparently came to the United States as an indentured servant in 1770. Where he was born and where he came from we don’t know, but we do have this handwritten notice from the Westmoreland County, Virginia archives:

By March of 1793, however, Daniel is a tailor, living with his wife Alice in Farnham Parish of Richmond County Virginia, where they are selling off four acres of land in Westmoreland County that Alice inherited from her father. How he fared after that we don’t know but he was dead by sometime in 1806. In 1807 his son William was called the “orphan of Daniel Ruick” and a man named William Smith was appointed as his guardian.
William married Nancy Ann Hudson in January of 1820 and seems to have stayed in Richmond County, but he too had a pretty short life because by 1835 Nancy was a widow. William and Nancy’s daughter Alice was the woman who married John Ball Lewis and became our third great grandmother.

Here she is. Alice must be the person from whom all the Northen women get their good looks. It sounds like a pretty straight arrow story. Daniel was the father of William, William was the father of Alice and Alice married John B. Lewis.
If Alice Beale was the only wife that Daniel ever had, its reverse was not true. Alice’s father, Thomas Beale owned land in Westmoreland County Virginia where his family had been for at least four generations. Thomas Beale’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been named Thomas as well, coming to Virginia through York County in 1646. So unlike Daniel, Alice was well-established. Moreover, Daniel was Alice’s third husband. In 1777 when her husband gave her a piece of land, her last name was Ste;phens, and from that marriage she had two children, Elizabeth and Thomas. In her father’s will of 1786, nine years later, her last name is Rust and she may well have been married to Peter Rust, “a gentleman of Richmond County.” It could be this marriage that explained her move to Richmond County. By 1793 she was married to Daniel. In 1806, Alice’s oldest son, Thomas made a will leaving half of his estate to his brother William Ruick. No mention is made of whether Daniel was still alive at that point, but by 1810, Alice was married once again. This time to John Efford.
In her history of the Northern Neck of Virginia, which includes Richmond , Westmoreland and Northumberland Counties, Miriam Haynie writes, “Due to distances and lack of transportation the widow’s hand was sometimes spoken for at the funeral of her husband by one of the guests who was afraid that he might lose out if he waited to make another visit.” While this may not have been the case with Alice Beale, it is true that if a woman had a bit of land, as Alice did, it made her more attractive – especially to a widower who had children of his own. For a widow’s part, if her husband died, it left her in bad straights economically, so she may have been quite eager to remarry. In 1800, the combined population of Richmond and Westmoreland County was 13,000 and throwing in Northumberland added another 7800. The fact that many brothers seemed to marry women with the same last name (often sisters) and, not infrequently, their own cousins, argues for the fact that people tended to marry whoever was eligible and at hand. This may be the reason that Alice, who came from a once prominent family ended up with Daniel, an ex-servant and tailor.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

I just came across an old photograph of my Grandpa and
Grandma Wilkins. They are standing on the side of their family home in Santa
Ana, California – a house that was also my home from the end of seventh until
the beginning of eleventh grade. I’m
really glad to have this picture for all of the memories that it triggers, and,
of course, so that I am able to picture my grandparents themselves. There is one realization, however, that is
very disconcerting and that is that my grandfather, whom I always considered to be the epitome of an old man, is actually almost five years younger in this
picture than I am as I write this. It
does not help a whole lot, either, that Lora is exactly my grandmother age
here.

One thing that age does give you is perspective. It seems
that real life is almost exactly the opposite of what
famously happened in A Picture of Dorian
Gray, where the man was able to keep
his young looks for ever, while his picture in the mirror continued to
age. When I look in the mirror and see
my aging face with all of its wrinkles, I am always taken by surprise because in the
mirror inside of my head I am still not even half of my age. At least that is how it feels. I imagine that my grandfather as he sat there
also must have thought of himself as much younger than he looks in this
picture. While I don’t believe, as the
old saw says, that with old age comes wisdom, I do think it reveals to you just how much you
didn’t realize when you were younger…and perhaps that’s a good thing.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Ash Wednesday,
marking the beginning of Lent, occurred just a couple of weeks ago. Having
been raised in a household where the beginning of Lent meant the family saying
the rosary together each night and visiting the church to follow the Stations of
the Cross, the onset of Lent use to be a real time of reflection for me, and
that reflection would often culminate in the writing of a poem.

In recent
years, I have been so caught up in the day-to-day busy-ness of life that I
often skim past the beginning of Lent
without it even registering that we are into the Easter season. Fortunately, Ed is much more attuned than I
am. Yesterday, he sent me a poem he
had written that I think does a remarkable job of being on both an observation
on the transmutation of language and a reflection on what the season means.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Anyone
who knew Mom and talked with her much new that eventually Mom would mention
“the Flood.” Even as recently as October
the year that she died, when Dave and I
visited her at Chapman hospital, she was telling stories of the early days in
Santa Ana and mentioned the flood. It has always been hard for me to get a handle on just exactly
where and when this flood took place other than it was when she was still a
teenager living at home with her parents, so I knew it took place somewhere in
the first decade after they moved to California. The main point of the story,
though, was that in the flood, her family lost everything.

Yesterday
I was attending an event called Ancestry Day at the Philadelphia Convention
Center. As the conference was just about
to wind up, the main speaker was telling an anecdote about her grandmother who
claimed that she used to ride her horse in the river bed of the Los Angeles
River, something that the speaker disbelieved because the Los Angeles River is
now cement. Upon researching, however,
she found out that it was now cement because of the great flood of 1938 I Los
Angeles.

The
mention of a huge flood in 1938 in Los Angeles immediately caught my
attention. I went home and tried to find
out what could about the flood. By coincidence, I also discovered that one of
the few public records that I have of my grandfather Victor Wilkins other than
census data is a 1938 list of registered voters o f Orange County. He is listed as living in the west Santa Ana
district.

At the time of the flood, Orange and Riverside counties were predominately
agricultural area inhabited mostly by
farm families. As a result, most of the
news about the Los Angeles flood ignores them and focuses on Los Angeles. What the accounts do say, though is that
Orange County because it did not have an infrastructure like Los Angeles was
much harder hit. Beginning Feb. 27, 1938
nine inches of rain occurred in a period of twelve days. The first deluge did a fair amount of damage,
but the real jolt hit on March 3 when the banks of all of the rivers began to
overflow flooding everything. Jefferson Ave., which is now Tustin Ave.
and runs down the center of the city of Orange, basically became a funnel for
water and took on the appearance of a river with four feet of water. In Anaheim, alone, 19 people died and there
are varying conflicts about the whole amount but they seems to range between 40
and 100. Here is a link to a video of
the little town of Olive, that is just about Orange. http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/how-orange-county-tamed-the-santa-ana-river.html

The Anaheim paper of the time, the Anaheim Colony, reported that the
National Guard had to be sent in because of looting going on. Over 200 Hispanic people lost their homes and
one small Japanese settlement was completely wiped out.
Although, no one can know exactly what the experiences was like for Mom and
her family, this gives at least some idea of what the situation was like. It is amazing to me that, unlike many stories
that our memories magnify, this was no exaggeration on Mom’s part. I remember
her telling how their chickens all drowned, but little else. I’m interested to know if anyone else in the
family remembers Mom’s account of her experiences. I did find out that the newspaper of Santa
Ana at the time was called the Santa Ana
Daily Evening Registered (which in 1939 became The Santa Ana Register that I delivered) but the archives for that year
are all in local libraries that I do not have access to. If anyone in the family feel the urge to see
what they can find in them, it could be something interesting to add to our
family history.

Monday, January 27, 2014

I’ve been gradually reading back over my old journals to stoke my increasingly fading memory and in my journal that covered the month of July in 1986, came across that period of time when Mom and Dad went to visit Dad’s remaining family in Wicomico Church, Virginia and, we (Lora, Maya, Eli, and I ) went down to pick him up.
During the time that he stayed with us, Dad told me bits about his time growing up and this is one of the paragraphs I have recorded in my journal:

"My dad said that he started his schooling at 8 and was placed in second grade. The way schooling worked (it was all mixed grades in one building)) was that at the end of each year you took a test to see if you passed to the next grade. If you didn’t you stayed in the grade that you were in. Dad said there were grown men 16-18 years old in the sixth grade. Most boys only went to school in winter and very few graduated. There were no compulsory attendance laws, so whenever there was work to be done, school stopped."

It is interesting to think about how different the American education system from that time and in some ways you it is the same. Take our “No child Left Behind” policy in which the only thing that counted. Just this weekend there was a cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer where a young couple was pushing a stroller up to a school and the cartoon showed the weeks class schedule: Monday – testing; Tuesday – testing; Wednesday – testing; Thursday – testing; Friday – testing. The cartoon said, “We were going to try to send him to school in the city, but I think we’ve hit a roadblock.” I can still remember teaching in Georgia and having a 16 year old in the seventh grade who could have passed for a man in any bar or college campus. I guess we haven’t come all that far from the day as when Dad was in school. The results back then that out of eght kids in the family, my Dad, his younger brother Colvin, and his sister Elizabeth were the only ones that graduated from high school

Sunday, January 26, 2014

No one can deny that that 2013 was a year of changes and
events for family members. Certainly
among these are Maura’s encounter with cancer, Lindsey’s passing her nursing
examines and beginning work in a hospital ER, and Pat & Rita’s addition to their
house and temporary relocation were among them. Nevertheless, there are many,
mostly smaller events, that happened to family members, too. I written down some “Guess who?” to test your
family connection IQ. If you get 8-10 right, you really keep up with the
family. If you get 3 or less right you were just lucky. (Of course, it is possible that some of these
answers may need to be changed. If you
have added information – make your comments.)

Guess who...?

Ran naked on
the beach?

Had to
evacuate their house?

Rode a horse
for the first time?

4.4. Worked with professional foot ball players?

Had a raccoon
in their house?

Was on a plane
hit by lightning?

Dressed up
like Michael Jordan?

8. Got a new dog?

Bought their
own boat?

Has their
middle name spelled wrong on their birth certificate?

Check out the answers below to see how you did.

1. No one went to a nude beach. It was Owen at Sea Isle
City, NJ this summer.

As tempted as I am to post pictures, I think I will save them as
blackmail for when he is a teenager.

2. Ed and Carmen.
This was no joke. The large fire
on in the vallwy where they lived made the national news. Though Hailey
residents were asked to evacuate overnight and Carmen did, as an ex-fire
fighter, Ed stayed behind to help as the fire approached their town.

3. The answer is Dan.
After some post ponements, Maura and Dan made it to the cowboy town of
Winthrop in east Washington state. It
was Dan's first time on on a horse. But I also learned that Maura had taken
horseback riding in college - a fact I did not know.

4. Eli. He has been involved with work for the United
Way in Baltimore. There was a day when inner city kids were invited to a
training camp with wide receivers from of the Baltimore Ravens. Eli was there as a representative of his
firm. (Perhaps the Ravens should have recruited some of those kids.)

5. One might think this was Ed but he was the one with a
moose in his yard. The real answer is
Maura and Dan again. Kitty spotted the
raccoon - it wasn't pretty.

6. Triple answer here. Maya, Lora and Mike. They were on a plane flying out to Las Vegas
during some potentially turbulent whether when they felt - depending upon who
is telling the story - either a slight bump or a near explosion. No damage was done.

7. Andrew.
Andrew's school has a "Wax Museum" in which each year student
picks a person that they admire to study, dress up like and then give a speech
about when visitors come up and activate them by touching their hand. Anrew
picked Michael Jordan.

8. Andrew wanted a dog, Maya inherited a dog, and
Melissa, sadly, lost her dog of many years, but it was Amelia who got the new
dog. She named it Poppy. Deja vu.

9. Judi and Pat. They have an RV parked down near the
boat so that now they can just go down river on the boat to visit Brandi,
rather than drive. I guess in some cases
retirement and fishing really do go together.

10. Elvera Northen.
Kind of a trick question, I know, but I sent for my parents' birth
certificates this year and when I got Mom's her middle name is spelled
"Cathrine" rather than "Catherine." Bonus question - do you
know who has no middle name on their birth certificate?